Looking for lemons on Juno Ledge

[ricki]

So, a year passes by and within a week we head back up to see the lemon sharks again. The dive was setup again by http://www.meetup.com/goldcoastscuba/ and with the same boat, "Sandy's Sunday". We did two dives, the first on some wrecks and the second a drift down the westward facing Juno Ledges.



A lot of the regular active divers in the group show up for the trip including both Steve and Brian from the meetup sponsoring shop, http://www.goldcoastscuba.net/ .




The first spot is quite close to Palm Beach Inlet, about 12 minutes out. So, we gear up and get ready to hit it. As it turns out there is a ripping northward current on the order of 2 kts. and poor visibility less than 30 ft. or so. The bottom is about 72 ft. deep. We hit the wrecks strewn with some heavy hemp cables and then proceed to drift over sand a while to the north.



I think this is Kim taking some of her normally excellent photos. We did the dive in the afternoon so the sun was lower particularly on the second dive a couple of hours before sunset. So, between the low light and poor viz. shooting conditions were poor.




Here's a HD2 GoPro video from the dive. I had the GoPro running in a chest harness but wasn't very optimistic about getting useable video out of it given the dark, turbid conditions. I was surprised by what it captured blowing away the still quality from my more costly Canon G12 setup.



CLICK IMAGE TO LINK TO VIDEO





Visibility improved slightly on the second dive but the temperature dropped to 68 F. That is cold for SE Florida oceanic water! I saw sharks four times on the second dive, this being one of them. Ended up trying to clean this up in Photoshop with limited success.




We saw a few loggerhead turtles although none as massive as that one from last year pictured above.




We drifted into some massive schools of spadefish milling through the water column or in grottos closer to the bottom.




Another shark, have to say these look like Caribbean Reef sharks to me and not lemons. Input? This shot is a screen capture from a GoPro video.




This turtle posed out in the open on the bottom for Meta to take some nice strobe shots.




Another shark with some major Photoshopping.




Turtle-wrasse




And, here's the boat to pick us up after the second dive.


Hope to see a swarm of lemons one of these times, so might head back before a year passes to try my luck again.


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